Utah residents and a progressive nonprofit are suing officials over Kevin O'Leary's planned Stratos Project AI data center, arguing that the special authority overseeing it gives unelected officials too much control over land use, taxation, public health, and local governance. The lawsuit comes as O'Leary has agreed to shrink the proposed… Read More »
After 50 years of searching, astronomers say they have finally found evidence of a long-sought "wind" blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow. And there is no perfect vacuum in the universe," team co-leader and Northwestern… Read More »
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different -- and typically smaller -- reactor designs, only one of them has been fully… Read More »
A security researcher says evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using an obscure GPS message field for nearly 20 years to broadcast encrypted key-distribution data, effectively turning GPS satellites into a global "numbers station." The hidden-looking 176-bit messages appear tied to the Pentagon's Over-the-Air Distribution system for… Read More »
Ahead of its upcoming IPO, SpaceX announced that Google will pay the company $920 million per month for access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs and related compute infrastructure. Google says the agreement is short-term "bridge capacity" to meet stronger-than-expected demand for Gemini Enterprise, while SpaceX is using deals like this and its… Read More »
Bitcoin briefly fell below $60,000 on Friday, "extending its weekly loss to nearly 20% and threatening to fall below $59,000," reports CoinDesk. Crypto was also hit by a 40%-plus plunge in Zcash after Shielded Labs disclosed a years-old bug that could have allowed undetected counterfeit ZEC creation. From the report: Now, with stocks in plunge… Read More »
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit's repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of… Read More »